Friday, 30 August 2013

Pluvial sits upon the broad and wasted plains of
Ennui, highly fertile arable land fed by the flooding of Lethe. Not farmed at
any time, its muddy shoals left to rot.

Justice

In Pluvium, they don’t call you for jury service,
they call you to judge.

The most important factor is that person judging a
crime is in exactly the same mental state as the criminal was when the
committed it. So, drunk, angry, desperately in love, insane, enraged, jealous
or suicidal. Whatever you need to commit that crime, that’s what you need to
judge it. The courts of Pluvial send all over the city, and sometimes all over
the world for someone in the exact right state of mind to judge a particular crime.

Killing your husband or wife is generally ok, if
they were really annoying. Suicides are always found guilty in-absentia during
very quick trials. Theft is rarely prosecuted as you never get a conviction.

Religion

Any god may be worshipped, but prayers are allowed
only to request from a particular god those things the god is unable to give. From
the Devil – pity, from the Buddha – engagement, from Thor – calm, from Zeus –
chastity. Faith is encouraged so long as you are in the middle of losing it.

Holidays

Weekend trips are laid on to Cythea, a black naked
island in a stormy sea, strewn with creaking gibbets, populated only by wasted and
highly political lesbians with a culture of forced nudity in all weathers.

Society

Casual conversation with friends must include some
cursing or disparagement of the Prince, he listens at doorways secretly
hungering for the amused condescension of the people. If the Prince hears you
mocking him, he screams, rolls on the ground clutching his head and staggers
away shaking and cursing you. Then he writes a poem about you. If the prince doesn’t
hear you cursing him he leaves silently and you disappear the next day.

Conversations begin and end with frightened cried
of “curse our worthless Prince!” and “curse the rhymes!”

Alcohol is encouraged but pluvial law says to
drink at all you must drink at least 7 units in the first ten minutes or face
arrest. Beyond that point you are on your own. Regular drinking tests are administered.
Taste is ignored but impurities are added to guarantee particular kinds of
hangover. Drinks are named after the depressions and headaches they provoke.

Art and the Media

Portraits are allowed only if the subject is
decapitated before they are painted. Famous portraits are required to family
tombs, though they can take a while to complete.

Art is only of the dead.

Porn is only of the dead.

Porn is required reading.

Other art is optional.

Most of the newspaper is porn and you have to read
it once a day.

Pluvial ID is a copy of todays paper and some
questions about its contents. This makes you a citizen.

Everyone is familiar with recent obituaries and
editors try to sneak in useful news under descriptions of the recent activities
of the just-deceased. For instance, this recent label to a picture of a
headless corpse fucking a starved, dead, naked pensioner.

“..while attending the recently-built bridge
across the lachrymose tributary, Monsieur R- was decapitated by a falling
stanchion from by what he described, a few moments before its collapse, as

‘a really excellent piece of engineering!’

The papers artist Mademoiselle G- states of the
wound,

‘I couldn’t have done
better myself’.

The bridge is now closed and pedestrian traffic is
asked to divert around the Rue De Smiles or ‘just throw yourself in the river’.
Curse the Prince.”

Pluvians tend to look at your hands while they
talk to you, in case they need to recognise your pornographically-arranged
corpse in tomorrow’s paper.

A common Pluvian ‘joke’ amongst familiars is “I
thought I saw your thumbs in the paper!” Sometimes an expression of happy
surprise that you are alive, meaning ‘It’s been too long’. But also, sometimes
a coded criticism from an older relative for not visiting enough.

All Pluvian plays and fiction are comedies, all
set in a better version of Pluvia, a-

‘Babel of endless stairs, arcades

It was a palace multifold

Replete with pools and bright cascades

Falling in dull and burnished gold’

In these fictions loving couples live happily ever
after, caring families stick together, decent Priests praise kind rational
gods, wars are short and glorious, cares are few and no crime goes unpunished
under the blue and golden sky. The Prince of Carcasses commands this because he
wants his subjects to dream of that perfect world. Every morning, when they
wake up from that dream, and remember who and where they really are, just for
one moment they understand how he feels every day.

Thursday, 29 August 2013

The life of a skeletonised beggar in Pluvial is
not so bad. The arthritis from the semi-constant rain is gone so you can stand
straight up at least. You get (have) to dress up for the balls as well. You
still have to bend, caper and dance madly as the prince goes by. He likes to
scream in rage-black madness at the sight. It’s easier, at least, than simply
being old.

Skeletons and flensed bodies animated by poetic
backwash do most of the menial work and Tomb conversion. They don’t really get
tired. The free labour has destroyed what’s left of the economy, which runs
mainly on prostitution and words.

Ancient men must bend at 90 degrees and crackle
around in single file tapped out in held canes cut only from lumps of the
darkest wood. No pine. No beech.

The blind are commanded to gawp and loll madly in
the streets, regardless of how they feel about the matter, though some have
taken to exchanging braille pocketbooks which they read secretly by fingertips
whilst moaning at the tapping of dancing skeletons they cannot see.

Young children are allowed out if they look
suitably thin, ghastly and/or starving-gamine. Average, plump children, the
middle aged, the robustly proportioned and those with good skin and bright eyes,
tend to get their jobs done in the morning and mid-afternoon when the Prince of
Carcasses sleeps. Or on Tuesdays which he has banned as ‘gauche’ and now
ignores as a matter of form. (Or simply expands Monday and Wednesday by 12
hours each to meet in the middle.)

Women by decree must be beautiful or old. Old
women must be pitied and wept over wherever they go. Grey locks and ragged hems
caressed as periapt’s of Age and Loss. But not actually helped in any physical
way, for instance, picked up off the ground, or given somewhere to live.

Social events are sometimes licenced if sufficiently
symbolic of decay. For this reason, aging prostitutes in flaking greasepaint
are in much demand, bussed in en-masse in broken coaches drawn by pale and plaguy
mares. They un-liven retirement parties and camouflage happy weddings with
broken decorations and pre-weathered paint that cracks on application to the
wall. Burghers hold covert barbecues on tomb-top roofs when the sun peeps out
from round a cloud.

The sewer system is excellent. Or at least
capacious. Labyrinthine. Cathedral-Naved, baroque, knotted like lost string and
several times deeper that the city is tall. Presumably the stuff is going
somewhere. Though drainage does descend below the water table and keep going,
which seems strange. In a way, it’s lucky it rains so much. The constantly
running water means that despite much encouragement, tuberculosis has yet to
take hold. White foundation, diet books and re-useable blood clots can be
bought at local shops.

Men have been hired to paint the sky the colour of
bruises and rot, to no effect. Enquiries of their progress have not yet been
made.

Crime has been encouraged in song and handy
ratways built across the tomb-top roofs in hopes that assaulters, housebreakers
and masked bandits will transit silently in the night. Lack of anything to
actually steal has limited opportunities for crime but numerous anonymous
try-hards still make the nightly effort, climbing around, passing each other on
the midnight eaves, sometimes mugging each other in a sad, ritual way.

Once, someone broke into the Princes garret (he
lives alone in a broken-down tenement made especially for him.) The Prince
found evidence of the crime and the resulting breakdown kept him out of
everyone’s hair for two weeks. Regrettably it also resulted in several poems.
The experiment has not been repeated.

Wednesday, 28 August 2013

Loathsome, tiresome, heroic only in the smallness
of his self-awareness, the Prince of Carcasses throws himself down in the muddy
soil next to a tomb, bounces off the marble top and lies writing, undulating
like a snake, gripping the cold sides and pushing his head backwards into the
mud.

On cue three footmen ring the largest cauldron,
hoist it up and shake it back and forth. The rolling rocks counterfeit the
sound of storms.

A second crew holds up a huge black velvet
circular shade on dull brass poles, designed specifically to blot out the sun.
They place the Prince of Carcasses in the centre of his carefully ordered blot.
A third stands by the moaning man as he crawls, he holds out an iron sieve on a
pole and delecatly shakes cold rainwater over the princes weeping face.

“Oh monstrous ice-hearted woman with a daemons
eye!” cries the Prince. He waves and makes a writing sign. A servant sighs. Paper
is brought. A pen. Another woman will die soon.

The Prince of Carcasses is searching for a woman
who can appreciate the grey churning depths of his ennui and the dark silent
tragedy of his fallen soul. This will never happen. The Prince of Carcasses is a
snivelling privileged little shit who happens to have a magical talent.

The Prince loves women. He doesn’t really pay much
attention to what they do or why they do it or what they say, or what that
means, or how they act when not around him. But he loves them. He is hungry for
them and drawn to them. They pin him with arrows of burning desire. He shakes
and shivers in their wake. Turned ankles corkscrew his heart.

When the prince can no longer hold back the red
gurgling of his onrushing love, he writes a poem. The woman becomes immortal. Her
body dies.

No-one knows what the women involved think of this
as he steals their voice at the same time. They are silent forever.

Depending on how the prince felt about them, the
women become different kinds of undead. Those he watched and worshipped from
afar usually transform into pearly floating ghosts and beautiful wraiths. Those
he was sexually obsessed with slowly rot. Zombies. He watches as their naked
flesh decays. Knowing no-one can ever comprehend the storm of emotion in his poets’
soul. Who knows the poets spleen!

The Prince of Carcasses has had all the buildings
in his city replaced with graves. All the buildings are buried or disguised as
statues and tombs. He has taken the tops off drains the make the gurgling
resonate and commanded greyness and continual rain. This has had no effect.

He has replaced all forms of entertainment with
games of solitaire played with incomplete packs of cards in empty wood-panelled
rooms. You can also listen to music, so long as it seeps out of a building
several doors down. He also advises you to stare at the sky when it is blank.

He likes cats and is kind to them, possibly
recognising the only other form of life as self-centred and indifferent as
himself.

The Prince always hungers for witty conversation,
his own. He does, however, need someone to talk at. If you visit with the
prince he will not listen to you. When you are gone he will compose satirical
verse about your stupidity and cloddish indifference, it will be believed. He is
a genius after all.

Despite his tendencies, women often still attend
the prince. He pays well, the city is poor and there are no jobs. No-one
destroys the poems. They are too beautiful. He publishes them. Poetry is the
cities remaining export.

Sunday, 18 August 2013

There are shitloads of giants in the monster manual
so I can’t see how one more will hurt. Seriously, it seems like every possible
type of terrain got its own giant. Mountain giants are not hill giants, forest
giants are not jungle giants. There are no garden giants, and no terminal moraine
giants. No archipelago giants. I feel like glacier giants deserve to be their
own thing, though they seem to have been absorbed in the rather-unimpressive
frost giant. Beach giants must be a combination of desert giant and reef
giants. There is no city giant and no moor giant.

Anyway.

Arnold
K already did a very good post about very giant alien giants who swim
through the earth. Go and read that first.

Cave giants can no longer walk. Naked, hairless
and pale. Full-body scar marks cross the thumb-sized varicose veins that wind
across their skin. They crawl, if they have the space, on deeply calloused
forearms and knees, pausing often to listen and sniff the air. Their bones have
turned to flexible cartilage like a sharks and will no longer support their
weight when standing up. They can, however squeeze their way around
underground, passing through narrow gaps that would trap any other kind of
giant. This giant could come into your house though the front door. It could
slowly squeeze its body up your stairs, filling the stairwell with its flesh,
then send one questing hand through your bedroom door. It could squeeze its
head into your room and look at you.

Cartilage deforms more than bone so a Cave Giant
can, with time, work its way through spaces that in human scale would be little
bigger than a letterbox mouth, about the size (relatively) of an A4 book. It could come in
through your window like a burglar.

They crawl around, semi-blind and sniffing
constantly with their remarkable sense of smell. They have not yet fully lost
their sight as long lifespans means giants evolve (or devolve) quite slowly.

If they could stand they would be about 18 or 20
feet tall, but slender and starved. As the crawl, their eyes will be about five
feet off the ground, level with yours.

They have lost none of their strength. They climb
well, oozing and creeping up the rock with every point of their flexible body
in contact. They lack leverage due to their flexible bones so usually choose to
strangle, crush or twist apart their prey.

You may be attempting a passage just low enough to
make you crouch, and see, ahead of you, a pale gigantic hand reaching towards
you, clutching at the rock. Behind it an arm, a shoulder and then a gawping
face filling the width of the passageway, rolling opalescent eyes under half-closed
lids. A mouth like the boot of an economical car.

What to you, is a walking passage, to the giant is
a dangerous squeeze. It must lie flat, with one arm extended out and the other
pressed back against its side. It lets the stone scrape and compress its
cartilaginous skull and distend its head to the corridors shape.

If you will not, or cannot retreat, the giant has
no choice, it cannot turn around. Its only option is to crush you against the
wall with its outstretched hand, or grab you and squeeze you to death, then to
slither forward and scoop you up in its mouth. It must eat you, chewing well,
equipment and all, to get you out of the way.

There are very few Cave Giants and they must move
constantly to find food and avoid organised resistance. They call to each other
by finding hidden seams of rock, biting into them, and screaming into the stone
in ultra low-frequency. It’s huge body, and its wide contact with the stone let
it sense low frequency waves reflected from the strata.

The rest of the time they are silent, like much
cave life. Highly intelligent, they exchange much information with their
strange long howls into the rock, mainly about threats, prey and changes to the
environment. They are of neutral alignment, but, like everything underground,
they are constantly hungry. If you could find one after it ate, you might
possibly be able to negotiate, though there is nothing they want.

They are loathed perhaps less than they should be,
as they hunt Fomorians. They stalk them invisibly from the dark, needing no
light, they wait for long periods, days, weeks, or months, without moving. They
watch from some impossibly small, door-sized crack, noting the movements of
their prey. Then, when all is still, they creep out, crawling silently towards
the sleeping freak. They slip rubbery fingers round its neck and choke out its
life. Then the drag it away to consume. If necessary they slowly twist off
limbs to get it through the gap. Cave Giants have perfected a way of twisting
the limbs from a gigantic corpse so that the skin knots at the joints,
preventing any flow of blood and meaning they leave no trace as they are
carried away. Very rarely, the Cave Giant plans badly and the trunk of the
Fomorian is too big to fit. They leave it propped up like a present, arms, legs
and head twisted off with neat little fleshknots where they were. They carry
the limbs off like a string of sausages.

Fomorian slaves never wake their masters while a
cave giant crawls towards them. They know the giant will often release them
just before it leaves, though this is to create chaos that will mask its trail
while it escapes.

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

The expected market for Vincent Baker's 'The Seclusium of Orphone' is (Choose 2 or 3)

People in the OSR who like posh books and can choke down dodgy design choices.

Those on old White Wolf forums who know who Jack Vance is.

People who don't roll their eyes at the use of the phrase 'Stormy Eyes'.

People with LOTS of free time before games.

People who really enjoy drawing their own detailed maps for a product they just bought.

That guy who thinks Baker is part of a conspiracy to destroy gaming by perving it up.

People who would quite like access to alleged above conspiracy

People who own d7's.

Those people who used to be the forge but I think they're storygames now?

A strange new circle of people who may slowly crystallise around the book over time, it being neither one thing nor another, it may generate it's own subgenre. Vornheim might so this might.

Basically nice people who want a go at being 'dark' and 'edgy' in controlled circumstances.

Maybe literary people? the tables being fucked makes it look less like a game, so people too up themselves to read Vornheim might potentially read this and think they've discovered and whole new thing and get all up on the lit blogs with it. Could there be an article in Forbes? Gasp.

The first parts of the book were designed; (Choose 1 or more)

For those who like random tables, but not 'too' random.

Specifically to irritate a small circle of OSR bloggers.

For people who would rather put one egg in a pre-bought mix and call it cooking, instead of buying a pre-made pie or cooking it from scratch.

To maximise the pleasure of flipping back and forth in a hardback book. Endlessly.

Not to scare hippies.

To maximise white space.

To show off the cool flower designs on the paper stock.

Because if you can't cram pseudo-magical glyph designs into an rpg book any more then we may as well burn down the whole enterprise and go home.

Because we paid for a special font for the chapter headings and were damn well using it.

Badly.

Cryptically.

Mysteriously.

To annoy people who know the last three options are all true but they can only pick one. (OR ANOTHER OF YOUR OWN CREATION)

Because its a book of random tables, so if you just give people the tables and a fully completed Seclusium with a fucking map they can use straight away they will feel robbed somehow?

To keep the scum out.

To instill wisdom in the reader through suffering, so they have the self knowledge to fully appreciate the good stuff at the back by the time they get there.

The lists in Seclusium contain; (... and choose 2-4)

Useful things

Good things artfully seperated to ensure maximum flipping back and forth.

Pretentious things

Many things neither 'boring and useful' or 'poetic and energetic' but a strange blur between the two.

Many cases where it would be better if you just used all of the available choices.

Awkward numbering.

Reassuring repetitions of the statement that you can choose or create your own thing, presumably because some fucking idiot somewhere wrote a blog or forum post saying 'this product does not explicitly tell me I can think for myself while using it? How them am I to know if I may do so???'

A lot of good stuff.

Some really interesting rules for magic item creation.

A lot of Bakerism's if you are (choose 1 or 2) into/offended by/amused by/vaguely reassured by them

Monday, 12 August 2013

It’s only just crossed my mind that I’m unemployed and need
a job and have a blog that people sometimes read.

If anyone needs any writing or RPG work doing, drop me a
line. If you want to know what I can do look over on the right, or just read
the blog. I do this stuff for free so if you pay me I can probably do better.

As a reward for reading through that corporate whoredom,
here are the final requests from when I was doing requests. I DID NOT FORGET
YOU MATT H, OK I DID A BIT.

“Thousands
of years ago the archipelago was a thriving maritime civilization which
dominated its neighbors through superior sorcerous firepower. It is now long
defunct and, though it is a very long way from anywhere, a whole economy has
sprung up around salvaging useful relics from the ruins. Think the 17th-century
Javan spice trade. The locals, who are largely lizard people, consider all this
wizard trash a nuisance at best, and they have an uneasy relationship with the
weird militant strangers from the far seas who are going to force you into
trading pacts whether you like it or not. What kind of treasure are they
digging up on these islands and why is it worth the months of starvation and
scurvy you have to go through to get there?

Alternatively, I don't know, a list of motivations for ghosts.”

But what if the things they were
digging up were also motivations for a dead empire of ghosts and that was the
source of their power and it was like ghost-colonialism (ghostlonial?) and
people of the present were using artefacts to use memories of the past for
political gain? Sorry Matt, I mashed
your requests up together to make one thing. Here are some things you could dig
up that are also motivations for ghosts.

You could roll 2d6 if you like.

FEAR

LOVE

HATRED

DUTY

GUILT

FAITH

COIN

Specie from the empire of MANPAC.
Anyone eating a coin can consume one ghost

Worthless coppers, covered eyes of true
loves corpse

Sold soul for this cash, will kill
whomever has it.

Final payment for unfinished contract,
mercenary ghost needs to get it done.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

‘They've knocked it out of the park. Hit it for six. Got it in an arm bar in the first round. Pick your sport, pick your metaphor, doesn’t matter: the point is clear – so soon after _Fire on the Velvet Horizon_, Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess prove once again that something as unlikely as an RPG supplement can be art, of the most impressive kind. An amazing work.’ - China Mieville

FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

"Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015." - China Mieville" Maybe my favourite thing we've made. If you like Scraps work click the pic.